GRAIN DELAY: MUTANT CHORUS

At first, the Grain Delay appears to be a beast intent on total sonic destruction, but as I’ve pointed out a few times this year, it really shines at some much gentler effects. I quite like using it as a chorus effect. Let’s take a look:

Spray is turned up a little bit. Strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary but the Spray control randomizes the delay time of the grains, treating the left and right channels differently and adds extra width to the effect.

Frequency is nice and low. A high frequency means a smaller grain size and tends to produce noisier or “windier” sounding effects.

Rand Pitch detunes the grains and is the primary source of the chorusing effect. Crank this way up and you’ll get radical pitch modulation that sounds sort of like sample & hold on a synth.

Feedback works just fine at zero, but a little bit increases the intensity of the effect. High values produce flanger-like artifacts (as long as Dry/Wet is kept below %100 and Time is kept low).

Time is set to 1ms like it is for many of my Grain Delay effects. With such a low delay time, it’s no longer being used like a classic delay effect. Cranking this up with the Feedback dialed up as well can produce funky out of tune delay tails.